Song Yao's Home Page - Faculty - Kellogg School of Management

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing and the McManus Research Chair at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. I have won the Paul Green Best Paper Award (2012) and the John Howard Dissertation Award (2009), both of which are sponsored by the American Marketing Association. I was the finalist for the INFORMS Frank Bass Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2011 and 2012, the John Little Best Paper Award in 2009 and 2011, and the Long Term Impact Award in 2017. I was also selected by the Marketing Science Institute as one of the MSI Young Scholars of 2017.

I am serving on the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science.

I teach MBA elective course “Customer Analytics” at the Kellogg School of Management. I also taught the Kellogg PhD course Applied Econometrics II.

Firms are increasingly trying to tab into social media and have users promote products on their behalf. But how effective is such a marketing strategy? In recent research of mine (with Stephan Seiler and Wenbo Wang), we address this question. Kellogg's magazine, KelloggInsight, provides a great summary of our findings.

The Benefits of TV Commercial Breaks

Conventional wisdom holds that viewers dislike commercial breaks during TV programming. However, what if you are currently watching a bad show.You don’t know which show is on another channel and may want to check it out. But you also don’t want to disrupt the current show.When the commercial starts, however, it becomes the natural opportunity to check out the alternative channel.In a recent paper (with Wenbo Wang and Yuxin Chen), we investigate viewers watching behavior during commercial breaks and explore the commercial timing strategy of TV channels. KelloggInsighthas a nice coverage of our study.